As someone who was greatly influenced by Bangs' great (and still not reprinted) essay Free Jazz / Punk Rock, I was shocked by "Kind of Grim," which dismisses Miles' 1972 recording On the Corner as "garbage," "the absolute worst album this man ever put out." "On this experiment in percussion and electronics," Bangs wrote in 1976, "what little actual trumpet you could pick out of the buzz-whiz and chockablocka was so distorted as to be almost beyond recognition." But because On the Corner wasn't simply "an off-note unaccountably put on record," but the beginning of a series of releases that included such other depressing "horseshit" as Big Fun and Get Up with It, Bangs claimed that "this music indicat[ed] that something was wrong with the progenitor, that he was not [merely] indulging himself or tapped out or merely confused," but that Miles was "sick of soul."
Five years later or, if you count Free Jazz / Punk Rock, three years later, Bangs was claiming that On the Corner was "something genuinely new," "the first jazz of the Eighties." Instead of being dead, of "having no discernible emotion in it," On the Corner is "almost obscenely, frighteningly alive." And this "change of mind" doesn't fail to implicate Bangs himself. He makes sure his readers know that, back in 1976, he "couldn't even hear it, much less feel its cold flame and realize its intentions," and "we could only grow into it [...] as time caught up with us and we caught up with Miles."
But this new-found appreciation is not an occasion for self-congratulation. No, far from it: back in 1976, Bangs writes, "there was something wrong with me [...] I was sweeping some deep latent anguish under the emotional carpet, or not confronting myself on some primal level." He'd dismissed On the Corner because "it exposed me to myself, to my own falsity, to my own cowardice in the face of dread or staved-off pain." And this, precisely, is the value of reading Lester Bangs so long (22 years!) after his death: like Miles' music, his writhing "will pry [pain] out of your soul's very core when he hits his supreme note and you happen, coincidentally, to be a bit of an open emotional wound at the moment yourself. It is this gift for open-heart surgery that makes him the supreme artist" -- or, if you will, the great moralist -- "that he is."